OTTO von BISMARCK

© MMXVII V.1.0.1
by Morley Evans

A century ago, the world was completely changed by the Great War. The world is changing completely again today. It is worth examining what happened then, even though it will not help us to know what the future has in store. We could at least try to learn something. The people who think they "have the most powerful military the world has ever known" (and they know who they are) need to reflect on the past. Wise up.

This essay by Eric Koch provides an insight into Germany, one of the most important protagonists of the twentieth century. It was originally published on his WordPress site and republished here with the author's kind permission. Thank you, sir. 

OTTO von BISMARCK

Eric Koch

Otto von Bismarck

Chancellor Angela Merkel has one thing in common with Otto von Bismarck. She dominates European politics. But what a difference!­ Would she have said, as her predecessor did, “The great questions of the day will be decided by blood and iron”?

Beginning in the revolutionary year 1848, the many elements that made up Germany could have proceeded towards unification along liberal democratic lines, or in a conservative militaristic spirit under the leadership of Prussia. The wrong path was taken. Thanks to Bismarck’s unique political gifts, unification, when it came in 1871, was achieved after the third military victory in wars he had provoked – against Denmark, Austria, France. The Second Reich he created became conservative and militaristic. Its constitution was non-democratic. When he spoke in the Reichstag, he invariably wore a uniform.

Bismarck was a giant. His gifts consisted of single-mindedness, high intelligence, a masterful grasp of strategy, an intuitive understanding of the psychology of his opponents, and a low opinion of mankind. It is one of the ironies of history that he introduced health, old age and disability insurance, the building stones of the modern welfare state. He did it not for any humanitarian reasons but to defang his socialist opposition.

After having achieved unification, he governed Germany for nearly another twenty years, making every effort to avoid war, seeing to it that Germany had good relations with Russia and resisting the temptation to acquire colonies in competition with England and France.

He was unable to see that the non-democratic Germany he created could only survive in the long run if it was governed with his skills. Once the country was under the control of the young, brash, theatrical Kaiser Wilhelm II, who thought he could do without Bismarck and who had none of his talents, the road was downhill all the way. The person ultimately responsible for the disaster was Bismarck, not the Kaiser who eventually turned out to be a mere tool of the general staff. It was Bismarck who had laid the ground for the catastrophe.


Wikipedia on Bismarck.

MOTIVE & METHOD

© MMXVII V.1.1.4
by Morley Evans

J.P. Morgan, Jr.

MOTIVE & METHOD

SOME PEOPLE THINK that the United States engineered the Great War (World War I). I do. Qui Bono? Was that possible? Why would the United States do such a thing?

WHY?

American libertarian ideology is driven to free people from the bondage of kings and empires. The American Revolution was the first in a long line of efforts to give something to the downtrodden masses. That's what they say it was all about. That's what everyone believes. The American Revolution came before the French Revolution, Napoleon and the Russian Revolution. "Freeing the world to death," has always been the hallmark of American foreign policy. It's in the American genetic code.

Here are two examples of hundreds of movies that illustrate the theme that honest American hillbillies teach the Old World new tricks. What was is the subliminal message of Elvis Presley and the Rock 'n Roll genre?
The Unsinkable Molly Brown with Debbie Reynolds
Sergeant York with Gary Cooper

HOW?

A century of peace following the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo made monarchy look safe, yet Great Britain was worried about losing its scientific, military and industrial preeminence to Germany and France had lost the Franco-Prussian War. 

The world was a powderkeg primed to blow. 

The United States has always had black operations. Americans became aware of one agency in the Second World War when Wild Bill Donovan ran the OSS. The Office of Naval Intelligence was established in 1882. The Revolutionary War 1776-78 was financed and sponsored by bankers in the City of London who owned the British East India Company, a company that behaved like a state with its own navy, army and flag. 

Final flag of the East India Company

The Serbian Black Hand — which assassinated the Austrian Archduke and started the Great War — was supported, financed and directed by shadowy "interests unknown". 

The Ukrainian Nazis who took over the Ukraine in 2014 after the Orange Revolution are descended from the Nazis who fought for Hitler in WW II and who continued to fight the Red Army after Nazi Germany surrendered in 1945. Stalin and Khrushchev had to deal with them. They have been financed, trained, equipped and directed by Washington through the communist and post-communist eras to conduct sabotage and assassinations. Today, they infiltrate the Crimea, the Donbass and Russia itself. Recently, they were active in Georgia, South Ossetia, Abkhazia and Chechnya. This is not new. Washington has always been a hive of busy bees.

While the average American may not be able to find Canada on a map, Washington has always possessed competent operators. One example is that the Office of Naval Intelligence cracked Japanese military codes before Pearl Harbor was attacked in 1941. FDR in Washington knew well in advance. Pearl Harbor was a "sneak attack" only to the American scapegoats in Hawaii who were pawns on Washington's chessboard.

Going back to the Great War: Setting the Great Powers to fight each other had them do all the work of destroying themselves.

Americans created the modern weapons used in the Great War. The list includes aeroplanes, machine guns, breechloading rifles, barbed wire and even submarines. Americans sold them to the Great Powers who went on to make their own. The Germans built factories to manufacture Hiram Maxim's machine gun.

Gold was used to buy American manufactured armaments. U.S. industry boomed. American financiers, like Morgan, loaned belligerents billions which had to be repaid with interest. Great Britain was wrecked. Americans sold guns, bombs, and butter to Great Britain and France. Germans were starved by the Royal Navy's blockade. Germany created the Unterseeboot (U-boat) to retaliate. Americans had built the first submarine during the Civil War. (Confederates did it to break the Union blockade called the anaconda plan.)

Ludendorff destroyed the Russian Empire and relieved the eastern front when he injected Lenin — "the communist bacillus" — into Petrograd (St. Petersburg) on April 16, 1917. Lenin who had been hiding out in Switzerland, where his bills were being paid by the Warbergs (the American banking dynasty), was transported by the Germans to Russia in a "sealed train". It was sealed, no doubt, to keep Germany from being infected. Russia was contaminated as planned, but so was Germany and the world after the war.

Industrialized slaughter destroyed in one fell swoop most of the empires of the earth leaving only one empire untouched and enriched — the United States of America, the empire that does not think it is an empire. (The Chinese empire had been destroyed a few years before. Some European empires never got the message that they were now unimportant. The Empire of Japan was destroyed in WW II. The British Empire and the rest had to wait for World War II and its aftermath to find out they were toast.)

That is what happened. Was it all an accident? Humm . . .

“Do you want to know the cause of war? It is capitalism, greed, the dirty hunger for dollars. Take away the capitalist, and you will sweep war from the earth.”

― Henry Ford

Was Henry Ford some sort of communist?

Kaiser Wilhelm II was the favourite grandson of Queen Victoria. He loved his grandmother. She loved him and nurtured him throughout a difficult childhood. The Kaiser's mother was Vickie, one of Queen Victoria's daughters. Queen Victoria died in her grandson's arms in 1901. The Kaiser admired Great Britain and the British Empire.  The Kaiser Wilhelm II, Nicholas II and George V were first cousins! They grew up together. Some say they had been friends. "If their grandmother Queen Victoria had still been alive, said the Kaiser, she would never have allowed them to go to war with each other," BBC.

Something went wrong. That's for sure. The Great War changed the world completely. The world is changing completely again after a century. Those who are first soon will be last.

BBC British History

Did Queen Victoria really die in the Kaiser's arms? Eric Koch says no, but the Kaiser always said she did, according to Koch. Why would the Kaiser say that if he hated all things, British?

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PROPHETIC

MMXVII V.0.0.0
by Morley Evans


"Every ambitious would-be empire clarions it abroad that she is conquering the world to bring it peace, security and freedom, and is sacrificing her sons only for the most noble and humanitarian purposes. That is a lie, and it is an ancient lie, yet generations still rise and believe it! ...  

If America ever does seek Empire, and most nations do, then planned reforms in our domestic life will be abandoned, States Rights will be abolished -- in order to impose a centralized government upon us for the purpose of internal repudiation of freedom, and adventures abroad.  

The American Dream will then die -- on battlefields all over the world -- and a nation conceived in liberty will destroy liberty for Americans and impose tyranny on subject nations." - 


George S. Boutwell  - (1818-1905) American statesman, Secretary of the Treasury under President Ulysses S. Grant, Governor of Massachusetts, Senator and Representative from Massachusetts 

END OF EMPIRE

MMXVII V.1.0.1
by Morley Evans

This is encouraging for anyone who knows what has been happening. Most will be awakened by hunger pangs, but they will be unaware of the reasons the abundance they have enjoyed has evaporated. Those who do know why utopia has become dystopia will may be powerless anyway. So it goes.

THE END of EMPIRE

by Chris Hedges

Homeless Sam

October 02, 2017 "Information Clearing House" - 

THE AMERICAN EMPIRE IS COMING TO AN END. The U.S. economy is being drained by wars in the Middle East and vast military expansion around the globe. It is burdened by growing deficits, along with the devastating effects of deindustrialization and global trade agreements. Our democracy has been captured and destroyed by corporations that steadily demand more tax cuts, more deregulation and impunity from prosecution for massive acts of financial fraud, all the while looting trillions from the U.S. Treasury in the form of bailouts. The nation has lost the power and respect needed to induce allies in Europe, Latin America, Asia and Africa to do its bidding. Add to this the mounting destruction caused by climate change and you have a recipe for an emerging dystopia. Overseeing this descent at the highest levels of the federal and state governments is a motley collection of imbeciles, con artists, thieves, opportunists and warmongering generals. And to be clear, I am speaking about Democrats, too.

The empire will limp along, steadily losing influence until the dollar is dropped as the world’s reserve currency, plunging the United States into a crippling depression and instantly forcing a massive contraction of its military machine.

Short of a sudden and widespread popular revolt, which does not seem likely, the death spiral appears unstoppable, meaning the United States as we know it will no longer exist within a decade or, at most, two. The global vacuum we leave behind will be filled by China, already establishing itself as an economic and military juggernaut, or perhaps there will be a multipolar world carved up among Russia, China, India, Brazil, Turkey, South Africa and a few other states. Or maybe the void will be filled, as the historian Alfred W. McCoy writes in his book “In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of US Global Power,” by “a coalition of transnational corporations, multilateral military forces like NATO, and an international financial leadership self-selected at Davos and Bilderberg” that will “forge a supranational nexus to supersede any nation or empire.”

Under every measurement, from financial growth and infrastructure investment to advanced technology, including supercomputers, space weaponry and cyberwarfare, we are being rapidly overtaken by the Chinese. “In April 2015 the U.S. Department of Agriculture suggested that the American economy would grow by nearly 50 percent over the next 15 years, while China’s would triple and come close to surpassing America’s in 2030,” McCoy noted. China became the world’s second-largest economy in 2010, the same year it became the world’s leading manufacturing nation, pushing aside the United States that had dominated the world’s manufacturing for a century. The Department of Defense issued a sober report titled “At Our Own Peril: DoD Risk Assessment in a Post-Primacy World.” It found that the U.S. military “no longer enjoys an unassailable position versus state competitors,” and “it no longer can … automatically generate consistent and sustained local military superiority at range.” McCoy predicts the collapse will come by 2030.

Empires in decay embrace an almost willful suicide. Blinded by their hubris and unable to face the reality of their diminishing power, they retreat into a fantasy world where hard and unpleasant facts no longer intrude. They replace diplomacy, multilateralism and politics with unilateral threats and the blunt instrument of war.

This collective self-delusion saw the United States make the greatest strategic blunder in its history, one that sounded the death knell of the empire—the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq. The architects of the war in the George W. Bush White House, and the array of useful idiots in the press and academia who were cheerleaders for it, knew very little about the countries being invaded, were stunningly naive about the effects of industrial warfare and were blindsided by the ferocious blowback. They stated, and probably believed, that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, although they had no valid evidence to support this claim. They insisted that democracy would be implanted in Baghdad and spread across the Middle East. They assured the public that U.S. troops would be greeted by grateful Iraqis and Afghans as liberators. They promised that oil revenues would cover the cost of reconstruction. They insisted that the bold and quick military strike—“shock and awe”—would restore American hegemony in the region and dominance in the world. It did the opposite. As Zbigniew Brzezinski noted, this “unilateral war of choice against Iraq precipitated a widespread delegitimation of U.S. foreign policy.”

Historians of empire call these military fiascos, a feature of all late empires, examples of “micro-militarism.” The Athenians engaged in micro-militarism when during the Peloponnesian War (431-404 B.C.) they invaded Sicily, suffering the loss of 200 ships and thousands of soldiers and triggering revolts throughout the empire. Britain did so in 1956 when it attacked Egypt in a dispute over the nationalization of the Suez Canal and then quickly had to withdraw in humiliation, empowering a string of Arab nationalist leaders such as Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser and dooming British rule over the nation’s few remaining colonies. Neither of these empires recovered.

“While rising empires are often judicious, even rational in their application of armed force for conquest and control of overseas dominions, fading empires are inclined to ill-considered displays of power, dreaming of bold military masterstrokes that would somehow recoup lost prestige and power,” McCoy writes. “Often irrational even from an imperial point of view, these micromilitary operations can yield hemorrhaging expenditures or humiliating defeats that only accelerate the process already under way.”

Empires need more than force to dominate other nations. They need a mystique. This mystique—a mask for imperial plunder, repression and exploitation—seduces some native elites, who become willing to do the bidding of the imperial power or at least remain passive. And it provides a patina of civility and even nobility to justify to those at home the costs in blood and money needed to maintain empire. The parliamentary system of government that Britain replicated in appearance in the colonies, and the introduction of British sports such as polo, cricket and horse racing, along with elaborately uniformed viceroys and the pageantry of royalty, were buttressed by what the colonialists said was the invincibility of their navy and army. England was able to hold its empire together from 1815 to 1914 before being forced into a steady retreat. America’s high-blown rhetoric about democracy, liberty and equality, along with basketball, baseball and Hollywood, as well as our own deification of the military, entranced and cowed much of the globe in the wake of World War II. Behind the scenes, of course, the CIA used its bag of dirty tricks to orchestrate coups, fix elections and carry out assassinations, black propaganda campaigns, bribery, blackmail, intimidation and torture. But none of this works anymore.

The loss of the mystique is crippling. It makes it hard to find pliant surrogates to administer the empire, as we have seen in Iraq and Afghanistan. The photographs of physical abuse and sexual humiliation imposed on Arab prisoners at Abu Ghraib inflamed the Muslim world and fed al-Qaida and later Islamic State with new recruits. The assassination of Osama bin Laden and a host of other jihadist leaders, including the U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaki, openly mocked the concept of the rule of law. The hundreds of thousands of dead and millions of refugees fleeing our debacles in the Middle East, along with the near-constant threat from militarized aerial drones, exposed us as state terrorists. We have exercised in the Middle East the U.S. military’s penchant for widespread atrocities, indiscriminate violence, lies and blundering miscalculations, actions that led to our defeat in Vietnam.

The brutality abroad is matched by a growing brutality at home. Militarized police gun down mostly unarmed, poor people of color and fill a system of penitentiaries and jails that hold a staggering 25 percent of the world’s prisoners although Americans represent only 5 percent of global population. Many of our cities are in ruins. Our public transportation system is a shambles. Our educational system is in steep decline and being privatized. Opioid addiction, suicide, mass shootings, depression and morbid obesity plague a population that has fallen into profound despair. The deep disillusionment and anger that led to Donald Trump’s election—a reaction to the corporate coup d’état and the poverty afflicting at least half of the country—have destroyed the myth of a functioning democracy. Presidential tweets and rhetoric celebrate hate, racism and bigotry and taunt the weak and the vulnerable. The president in an address before the United Nations threatened to obliterate another nation in an act of genocide. We are worldwide objects of ridicule and hatred. The foreboding for the future is expressed in the rash of dystopian films, motion pictures that no longer perpetuate American virtue and exceptionalism or the myth of human progress.

“The demise of the United States as the preeminent global power could come far more quickly than anyone imagines,” McCoy writes. “Despite the aura of omnipotence empires often project, most are surprisingly fragile, lacking the inherent strength of even a modest nation-state. Indeed, a glance at their history should remind us that the greatest of them are susceptible to collapse from diverse causes, with fiscal pressures usually a prime factor. For the better part of two centuries, the security and prosperity of the homeland has been the main objective for most stable states, making foreign or imperial adventures an expendable option, usually allocated no more than 5 percent of the domestic budget. Without the financing that arises almost organically inside a sovereign nation, empires are famously predatory in their relentless hunt for plunder or profit—witness the Atlantic slave trade, Belgium’s rubber lust in the Congo, British India’s opium commerce, the Third Reich’s rape of Europe, or the Soviet exploitation of Eastern Europe.”

When revenues shrink or collapse, McCoy points out, “empires become brittle.”

“So delicate is their ecology of power that, when things start to go truly wrong, empires regularly unravel with unholy speed: just a year for Portugal, two years for the Soviet Union, eight years for France, eleven years for the Ottomans, seventeen for Great Britain, and, in all likelihood, just twenty-seven years for the United States, counting from the crucial year 2003 [when the U.S. invaded Iraq],” he writes.

Many of the estimated 69 empires that have existed throughout history lacked competent leadership in their decline, having ceded power to monstrosities such as the Roman emperors Caligula and Nero. In the United States, the reins of authority may be in the grasp of the first in a line of depraved demagogues.

“For the majority of Americans, the 2020s will likely be remembered as a demoralizing decade of rising prices, stagnant wages, and fading international competitiveness,” McCoy writes. The loss of the dollar as the global reserve currency will see the U.S. unable to pay for its huge deficits by selling Treasury bonds, which will be drastically devalued at that point. There will be a massive rise in the cost of imports. Unemployment will explode. Domestic clashes over what McCoy calls “insubstantial issues” will fuel a dangerous hypernationalism that could morph into an American fascism.

A discredited elite, suspicious and even paranoid in an age of decline, will see enemies everywhere. The array of instruments created for global dominance—wholesale surveillance, the evisceration of civil liberties, sophisticated torture techniques, militarized police, the massive prison system, the thousands of militarized drones and satellites—will be employed in the homeland. The empire will collapse and the nation will consume itself within our lifetimes if we do not wrest power from those who rule the corporate state.

Chris Hedges, spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He has reported from more than 50 countries and has worked for The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News and The New York Times, for which he was a foreign correspondent for 15 years.

This article was originally Published by Truth Dig -

MORE ON VIETNAM WAR

© MMXVII V.1.0.1
by Morley Evans

William Blum

The new Vietnam documentary

At the beginning of Ken Burns’ new documentary on the American war in Vietnam, the narrator says the war “was begun in good faith by decent people out of fateful misunderstandings, American overconfidence and Cold War misunderstandings.”

The early American involvement in Vietnam can be marked by two things in particular: (1) helping the French imperialists in their fight against the forces led by Ho Chi Minh of North Vietnam and (2) the cancellation of the elections that would have united North and South Vietnam as one nation because the US and its South Vietnam allies knew that Ho Chi Minh would win. It was that simple.

[So much for Washington's devotion to freedom and democracy. If 'duhmockricy' doesn't produce what Washington wants, regime change is required to install a government Washington does like. - ed]

Nothing of good faith or decency in that scenario. No misunderstandings. Ho Chi Minh was a great admirer of America and its Declaration of Independence. His own actual declaration of 1945 begins with the familiar “All men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” But Ho Chi Minh was what was called a “communist”. It was that simple. (See the Vietnam chapter in my book Killing Hope for the details.)

Daniel Ellsberg’s conclusion about the US in Vietnam: “It wasn’t that we were on the wrong side; we were the wrong side.” (emphasis added)

Buy Bill's books!
williamblum.org

The Vietnam War was not a mistake. The War in Vietnam was business as usual. Look around. Read Bill's books. Deprogram yourself. -ed

DPRK Ambassador to the United Nations

MMVXII V.1.0.0
by Morley Evans

The Truth

the whole truth

and nothing but
the truth.

North Korea Ri Young Ho Minister For Foreign Affairs 

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/47887.htm

NORTH KOREAN FOREIGN MINISTER RI YONG HO is addressing the United Nations General Assembly in New York Saturday, after a week of fiery barbs traded between President Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has stoked tensions over North Korea's nuclear program.

Moments before Ri was set to speak, U.S. Air Force bombers flew in international airspace east of North Korea. The Pentagon said it's the furthest north any U.S. fighters have flown in the 21st Century. 

The speech comes after Ri threatened to test a hydrogen bomb over the Pacific, and Mr Trump issued an executive order targeting countries that trade with North Korea. At a Friday night rally for Republican U.S. Senate contender Luther Strange in Alabama, Mr Trump derided "little rocket man" — his new favourite term for Kim — and emphasized that North Korea would be dealt with. Earlier in the day, the president tweeted that he, Kim, is a "madman" who will be "tested like never before." In Mr Trump's speech to the U.N. this week, the president said he would "totally destroy" North Korea if the U.S. is "forced to defend itself" or any allies.

Kim, in a rare statement earlier this week, called the president "mentally deranged" and a "dotard," pledging to strike as needed.

"Whatever Trump might have expected, he will face results beyond his expectation," Kim said in the statement. "I will surely and definitely tame the mentally deranged U.S. dotard with fire."


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THE JFK PEACE SPEECH

MMXVII V.1.0.1
by Morley Evans

I am trying to spread the word.

This speech was made on June 10, 1963. It was spring! The Cold War was defrosting. Kenney and Khruschev were engaged in secret talks. On November 22, 1963, winter began again. Hope was snuffed out in Dallas. Will the forces of evil win? YOU must decide. If you continue to slumber in your coma, they will win. YOU must wake up. There is no one else. YOU have to do it. WAKE UP!

"YOU must be the change you wish to see in the world." - Gandhi

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fkKnfk4k40

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